Skip to main content

Tender Bar

Watching The Tender Bar was the uplifting experience I needed after a hard week. My problems faded away as I got immersed into the story. The character of Uncle Charlie was my favorite. It takes one person like that in a child's life to make a real difference. He is able to pull the main weight of the void in JR's life so the surrounding cast of characters can do their part to move this kid's life in a positive direction. Without Uncle Charlie things would quickly fall apart. Yet he carries his significant responsibility and influence on JR's life with a deft, light touch.

And that makes all the difference - his words of wisdom have staying power, he is able to navigate his nephew with an ease that parents would find enviable. The forces of adversity shaped the literary talents of this writer. A normal, suburban family upbringing would unlikely be able to produce the same outcomes. The grandfather was an interesting character too - depicted as not being generous with his love. So while he provides what he can to his family including two adult kids who seem to drift through life, he is not there emotionally. It is as if the kids are waiting for their quota of love, care and affection from their father to gather the strength to strike out on their own. 

The family configuration in the movie brought to mind one that I know well. The two children on in her late 40s and the other in his early 50s live in their childhood home with their old parents, playing out the rites of childhood and young adulthood ad-infinitium. The father now in his 80s was a provider but emotionally frozen to his offspring. 

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Cheese Making

I never fail to remind J that there is a time and place for everything. It is possibly the line she will remember me by when I am dead and gone given how frequently she hears it. Instead of having her breakfast she will break into a song and dance number from High School Musical well past eight on Monday morning. She will insist that I watch and applaud the performance instead of screaming at her to finish her milk and cereal. Her sense of occasion is seriously lacking but then so is mine. Consider for example, a person walks into the grocery store with the express purpose of buying detergent because they are fresh out of it and laundry is only half way done. However instead of heading straight for detergent, they wander over to the natural foods aisle and go berserk upon finding goat milk on sale for a dollar a gallon. They at once proceed to stock pile so they can turn it to huge quantities home-made feta cheese. That person would be me. It would not concern me in the least that I ha...
5 comments
Read more

Part Liberated Woman

An expat desi friend and I were discussing what it means to return to India when you have cobbled together a life in a foreign country no matter how flawed and imperfect. We have both spent over a decade outside India and have kids who were born abroad and have spent very little time back home. Returning "home" is something a lot of new immigrants like L and myself think about. We want very much for that to be an option because a full assimilation into our country of domicile is likely never going to happen. L has visited India more often than I have and has a much better pulse on what's going on there. For me the strongest drag force working against my desire to return home is my experience of life as a woman in India. I neither want to live that suffocatingly sheltered existence myself nor subject J to it. The freedom, independence and safety I have had in here in suburban America was not even something I knew I could expect to have in India. I never knew what it felt t...
111 comments
Read more

Under Advisement

Recently a desi dude who is more acquaintance less friend called to check in on me. Those who have read this blog before might know that such calls tend to make me anxious. Depending on how far back we go, there are sets of FAQs that I brace myself to answer. The trick is to be sufficiently evasive without being downright offensive - a fine balancing act given the provocative nature of questions involved. I look at these calls as opportunities for building patience and tolerance both of which I seriously lack. Basically, they are very desirous of finding out how I am doing in my personal and professional life to be sure that they have me correctly categorized and filed for future reference. The major buckets appear to be loser, struggling, average, arrived, superstar and uncategorizable. My goal needless to say, is to be in the last bucket - the unknown, unquantifiable and therefore uninteresting entity. Their aim is to pull me into something more tangible. So anyways, the dude in ques...
6 comments
Read more